Up to the Wire

December 25, 2007

I figure each year is good for about 2,000 new jazz records. This year I heard 650, which means I missed two out of every three. It also means I never had enough time to live with any of them, even favorites. So it’s hard to say which are the best, but these strike me as special:

1. Powerhouse Sound, Oslo/Chicago: Breaks (Atavistic). Ken Vandermark probes the differences between Europe and America, then proceeds to blow them all away.

2. Jewels and Binoculars, Ships With Tatooed Sails (Upshot). Makes a good case for Dylan as a melodist, then reshapes the melodies with Coleman Hawkins élan.

7. Kahil El’Zabar’s Infinity Orchestra, Transmigration (Delmark). The Ethnic Heritage Ensemble scaled up to 39 pieces, which add details so subtle you only gradually realize how far they’ve moved beyond the original trio.

In the reissues category, I missed out on Mosaic’s lavish box sets, but hardly had time after digging through Allen Lowe’s That Devilin’ Tune: A Jazz History [1895-1950] (WHRA), a book lavishly augmented with 36 CDs, divided into four cramped boxes of nine each. Deliberately anticanonical, he doesn’t get to Louis Armstrong until the end of disc nine, and doesn’t let bebop hold court while Kid Ory’s still cooking.